The crimes that women hold in silence would shock the world if revealed, prosecuted and punished. Incest, rape, sexual harassment, physical and emotional battering, trafficking, genital mutilation and most recently, mother battering—all plague the lives of women, sometimes before their adolescence.
Violence is always a possibility in every woman’s life, no matter how educated, protective or loving she is. Crimes against women are faceless, unacknowledged and unaddressed. Because your sisters fear for their financial survival, because they fear the retaliation of further violence, they remain silent. Because your sisters fear not being believed, they remain silent. The silent world she walks in keeps everyone far away, so she walks alone in darkness and confusion.
Why doesn’t the world want to know?
Why doesn’t the world want to acknowledge the private crimes against women?
Does our socialization make us believe that silence is our only choice after we have been violated?
As little girls, were we not prepared for the shock of being a woman in a Patriarchal world?
We all share the burden of her pain, and rejoice when the silence is broken by her truth. Her stories, we must hear, so we can feel the responsibility for her life. When her silence is broken, her victimization ends and womankind is freer.
For herself, she speaks; for all of womankind, she speaks. We must break the silence of the silence of crime, so the world will know that we will be a victim no more!
Violence Against Women from the book 'Kiss Your Life'
By:Ann Mody Lewis, Ph. D
Reason: 348 Page: 366
Commentary
- 85% of domestic abuse victims are women, 15% are men
- 38,028,000 women have experienced physical intimate partner violence in their lifetime.
- 1,509 women were murdered by men they knew in 2011
- 1 in 4 women will be victims of severe violence during their lifetime
- Men who experience domestic violence as children are 3 to 4 times more likely to be an abuser themselves
- 40-45% are the number of women raped or assaulted during a relationship
- A woman is beaten every 9 seconds in the U.S.
- 18,500,000 of mental health visits are due to intimate partner violence
- 81% of women who are stalked by a current or former male partner is also physically abused by that partner
- If there are firearms in the house women are 8 times more likely to be killed by an intimate partner.
If there is a reason to understand gender discrimination it is because it is the cause of ‘violence against women’. In his book: A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, former President Jimmy Carter details the cruelties inflicted on women:
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Rape
Honor killing
Genital cutting
Femicide (The murder of woman)
Gendercide (selective killing of female fetuses by abortion, neglect or murder)
Assaults on U.S., campuses and in the military
Physical violence perpetuated by boyfriends and husbands
Child marriages
Enslavement
Increasing rate of incarceration of vulnerable nonviolent woman because of antidrug policies.
Carter is convinced that, “The most serious and unaddressed worldwide challenge is the deprivation and abuse of women and girls, largely by a false interpretation of carefully selected religious texts and a growing tolerance of violence and warfare…”
This topic may seem like a dismal way to begin 2015, but I am convinced unless you realize that gender is at the root of ‘violence against women’ your mother, your sister, your wife or lover 'walk in danger'.
